She stared thoughtfully at the white face and the furious black eyes....
“Ivor, don’t be too angry,” she pleaded gently. “It’s so unimportant, that kind of thing!”
She was getting on his nerves, and it was a tremendous effort not to tell her so. She shouldn’t have heard, she shouldn’t have come in. Tarlyon and he might have got the thing more or less right, a bit cleaner anyway. He felt foul, foul. Like a thing from a pest-house. God, how queerly Virginia chose her men!
“Do you know,” she was saying, “I could have reminded him from the doorway—I was just outside, by the stairs—that it wasn’t his house, and that he was my guest, just like you. But I thought that would be common—wouldn’t it have been, Ivor?”
“Very,” he agreed shortly.
“So I thought I’d punish him by sending him to help with the luggage instead. I had to end it somehow, don’t you see? That was also common, I know, but less common—wasn’t it, Ivor?”
She simply made him smile, she was like a schoolgirl. And as he unwillingly smiled, she began to laugh, right into his sombre eyes, a long and low laugh of pleasure. He protested with nerves:—
“Look here, Virginia, if you can’t leave a man in peace to be angry with another man, what will you let him do?”
But she laughed, standing there almost against him, her face close to his: she laughed right into his sombre eyes....
“Oh, Ivor, you are a funny man, I do think!” she cried softly. “Though that isn’t why I’m laughing—in fact, I don’t know why! But maybe I’m laughing because I feel there simply must be something to laugh at in all this—and your very angry face, Ivor! There’s always something to laugh at in everything, dear, and if one can’t quite put a finger on what that something is, one must just pretend. So I’m pretending—and frightfully well, I do think! Don’t you? Answer me, Ivor?...”